We all use metaphors, generalizations, and other ways of abstracting from raw sensory data to help us make sense of the complex and fine-grained objective reality with which we have to cope. It is important to understand that the models we use to represent objective reality is not the same as the reality (the map is not the same as the territory). The failure to appreciate the difference between the events that happen and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of them, causes us to take our beliefs and perspectives too seriously [Reification].

Events and your reaction to events

The brain receives a lot of sensory input. To make sense of its environment, your nervous system summarizes and abstracts the raw data it receives to create understandings and stories. This interpretive process is vulnerable to the biases caused by your beliefs and perspectives. You can tell if you have fallen into a self-sabotaging trap by being vigilant for repeating patterns of counter-productive reactions to the things that happen.

The Transformation of Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde

Dr. Jekyll is a college professor who sees me for anger management — although I have never seen him when he is not calm and rational. His descriptions of his viscous arguments with his wife are delivered quietly and with often with great contrition. In my office Dr. Jekyll is experiencing these events from the dissociative perspective of the narrator; during the fight he is experiencing the same sequence of events from the associative perspective of a biological creature being provoked. For example, when describing a recent argument, Jekyll reports: “I felt hot and angry and thought, ‘she is always putting me down; she is such a bitch.’ But I know that I’m an ass-hole when I’m drunk. I’m probably more to blame than she is. . .”

The trance formation of Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde began the moment he took the negative appraisals of his wife seriously, as if she really was a bitchwho was alwaysputting him down. By the time I saw him in my office he had returned to the subjective reality of the rational Dr. Jekyll. Note his statement, “I thought, ‘she is always putting me down.” Once he was able to view things from the observer’s perspective he de-reified the concept that she was and always would be a bitch, and appreciated that the idea that she was a bitch was a creation of his nervous system, not hers.

Reification of pathogenic beliefs is the sinister potion
that turns the rational Dr. Jekyll into the destructive Mr. Hyde.
De-Reifying those abstractions is the antidote that can prevent
this trance-formation.

My mission as Jekyll’s therapist is to help him de-reify his pathogenic beliefs. The easy first step [described above] was to ask him to describe how the fight came about. To describe it to me, he had to review the sequence of external events and internal states from the perspective of an observer. This dispassionate narrator in my office was not handicapped by state-dependent distortions, and had cognitive resources — including the ability to think rationally and the awareness of his motivation to be a good dad — that were not available to Mr. Hyde.

Jekyll was embarrassed by how he looked from this dispassionate perspective. A bit later in the session he vowed he would never get angry at her again, and would work to make amends for his previous destructive actions. Easy for Jekyll to say, but can he speak for Mr. Hyde? [Note: In the past, vows made by Dr. Jekyll have been routinely broken by Mr. Hyde.]

Spouse abusers tend to follow a predictable sequence of escalating anger culminating in overt aggression, followed by a period of guilt, contrition, and the intention never to act out that way again. During the anger phase the previous intention not to act in the future has little influence, and during the contrite phase the abuser is certain that he will continue to perceive things from his current rational perspective, and so will never make that mistake again.

Intellectual appreciation of this Soul Illusion is not sufficient. To promote good outcome Dr. Jekyll will have to de-reify pathogenic abstractions such as, “She is always trying to undermine me. ”

Reification in the service of will

Therapy often focuses on the De-Reification of pathogenic abstractions, but Reification is also a powerful therapeutic tool. I have purposely reified the concept of self-sabotaging traps to help you conceptualize how the cause-and-effect principles work. However, these traps are not assumed to exist as real entities. They are merely abstractions — stories — that help make sense of things, rather than complete representations of the complex and finely-grained reality. [Likewise, the client examples presented throughout this course are used as fables that omit the complexity of the actual case, but still, hopefully, provide useful lessons for the reader].

The more you reify an abstraction — in the sense of taking it seriously and acting as if it were true — the greater the impact it will have on you. Since I think these concepts will be helpful to you, I want to reify them . On the other hand, you can help yourself by de-reifying pathogenic concepts such as “they are not going to like me” or “I’ve always been a loser.”

The Meta-Cognitive Awareness that your appraisals, judgments, and interpretations are fictions that you create will free you from the Soul Illusion that results from taking your abstractions too seriously.

As long as they are not contrary to objective facts, none of your creative fictions is valid and complete. Our collaborative task is to De-Reify the harmful fictions and Reify the helpful ones.

The Reification Fork

The events that happened in your life are what they are and can never be changed. However, the story you composed to summarize or interpret those events is one of an infinite number of equally valid creative fictions. Some of these interpretations are pathogenic in that they promote outcomes that are not only bad for you, but self-confirmatory and so they persist.

The mission of this course is to help you identify and De-Reify pathogenic abstractions, and to Reify the beliefs and perspectives that promote good outcome as you define it. With this in mind, a navigational fork is available here. One option is to follow a philosophical path that promotes de-reification of pathological concepts:

Or, you can use Suggestion as a tool to Reify abstractions that promote resourcefulness, confidence, and a healthy respect for the nature of your challenge.

Alternatively, you can follow the default path to access the contemporary thinking of Cognitive Therapy. Of particular interest are the pathogenic thinking errors to be vigilant for, and an excellent method to identify the specific cause-and-effect mechanism that is responsible for your self-sabotage trap.

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference

— Reinhold Niebuhr

Probably the best single piece of advice on how to escape a recurrent pattern of self-sabotage is the Serenity Prayer: Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

Here is the wisdom:

You can change your behaviors and attitudes.

You do not have control over most everything else, including the past, what other people think and do, and the outcomes of your efforts.

This Stoic Wisdom that will help you know whether to accept the things that happen or to invest your energies to change them. The Serenity Prayer is a great tool to promote the passage from the mentality of childhood [characterized by strong emotional reactions to the things that happen] to more advanced cognitive strategies.

Remember: You are responsible to act in accord with your interests and principles. Allowing your emotions to depend on things you do not control drains you of power.

Acceptance & Being Mode

Bad and good things will happen. Most are outside of your control; you will not even be able to control your initial reaction to those events. So, realistically, what do you have other than to develop the skill to accept the things that happen — without squandering your dear resources trying to fix it or evaluate it.

The Buddhist path is to practice non-reactive acceptance to the things you do not control. This mode of relating to subjective phenomena — “awareness of present experience with acceptance” is called Being Mode. The alternative problem-solving orientation in which we react to discomforts and difficulties by trying to evaluate the problem and solve it is called Doing Mode .

Training the puppy to accept the things it cannot change

There is nothing sinful, defective, or wrong about wanting to understand and fix problems, or about craving pleasure or relief. Those motivations are intrinsic to our species. However, when a particular mode of reacting repeatedly produces bad outcomes, you would do well to try a different mode of reacting and then pay attention to how things play out. Through this kind of personal research you will learn about yourself and how cause-and-effect plays out in your subjective universe.

It is difficult to do this kind of research because dispassionate acceptance and observation is not the typical mode of reacting when painful or frustrating things happen. Discomfort automatically elicits the motivation to solve the problem or seek relief. In fact, we have reacted this way so often that Doing is the default mode. So getting yourself to respond to discomfort with non-reactive acceptance and observation requires some doing.

The Being Mode exercises described in Awakening will help you learn to accept the things you cannot change without judgment or compulsion to fix it. This is the essential first step to escaping automatic self-sabotaging sequences of external events and internal states.

The Courage to Bring About Change

The objective of this course is to strengthen your will, not to make you passive. Sparing the effort and emotionality of trying to change the things you cannot change enhances the courage and strength required to exercise your will. The Serenity Prayer can also help you avoid the self-sabotaging frustrations that result from trying to fix thing that you do not have the power to fix.

The creature you inhabit is facing an important and demanding challenge. Your job as the caretaker of this creature is to do everything you can to help it become as strong and resourceful as possible. Experienced puppy trainers know that puppies are predisposed to intense emotional reactions to the things that happen, even when they had no control over them. As a kind and competent caretaker, you will gently help it practice acceptance of the things it cannot change.

You will always have problems. This course is successful if it allows you to trade one set of problems for a more interesting set. The next section focuses on one of the most interesting of problems: Deciding what is important to you. To act in accord with your interests and principles, you have to know what they are. Most people don’t.

Children are not born with knowledge of the world; they tend to believe what you tell them. For example, many believe that Santa is real; the cartoons and ads they see depicting Santa reify the concept. Children are unaware that their interpretation of events is a creation of their nervous systems and not necessarily accurate depictions of objective reality.

They label their beliefs in ways that crystallize their subjective phenomena into abstractions such as stories and character traits that they assume are real and permanent. For example: “Mommy is bad,” carries with it the tacit premise that “she really is bad and it’s not just that I’m cranky.” The dispassionate observer understands that the child’s cranky state influences his current appraisals, and mommy won’t always seem bad. Later, when the child is in a different emotional state, his appraisal will be distorted differently by a different state-dependent filter. Naturally, the child is unaware of the The Soul Illusion, and in each situation the child accepts his/her current appraisals as valid not just for now but for always.

Having de-reified the concept, most adults view Santa as a light-hearted fiction and so continue to reify it to children who seem to get more joy from the concept when they take it seriously. The down side of the joy and magic that comes from reification are the consequences of believing in something that is false. While there is not much harm in believing in Santa, children’s tendency to blindly accept what they are told make them vulnerable to predators. To influence a child to give up something of genuine value by getting them to accept a false belief is so easy that to do so is considered immoral and, in many cases, illegal. Some adults remain as vulnerable to external sources of control as they were when they were children. The naive belief in a 72 virgin payoff in the after-life is sufficient to motivate believers to murder themselves as well as innocent bystanders.

Meta-Cognitive Awareness offers protection from illusions that result from the reification of beliefs. An important developmental milestone, that not all adults achieve, is the understanding that one’s thoughts, emotions, and perceptions are the creations of their own nervous systems not valid and complete reflections of objective reality.

For example, when Barry appraises himself as a ‘social failure’ he has created within himself a concept from his own biased observations. Each time he acts as if this appraisal was valid he reifies it. Believing that he really is a social failure promotes distortions of perception, motivation, and response tendencies in ways that end up confirming the validity of the handicapping conception of himself.

The Meta-Cognitive Perspective

The Meta-Cognitive Perspective allows you to escape this trap by stepping outside of your current state-dependent biases.

For example, by shifting observer’s perspective of, say, your biographer you can observe how previous episodes of fear, anger, or shame distorted state-dependent phenomena in ways that promoted bad outcomes for you. The character your biographer is writing about is bound to follow the path of least resistance. However, the biographer, after so many observations, may have some recommendations about some simple changes that would benefit you.

In fact, you are the autobiographer, and you are responsible to follow the path that you, when you are in your right mind, appraise as the most advantageous. To do the right thing despite encounters with local conditions that would motivate you to defect requires the faculty of will. You are currently in the process of enhancing this faculty by exploring and developing your ability to work with the important cause-and-effect principles that determine the reactions of bio-psycho-social creatures such as yourself.

Phenomenology and Personal Research

As you read this text about subjective experience you are engaged in a meta-cognitive activity — thinking about thinking. The text describes some of the important cause and effect principles that pertain to subjective experience, so that you can have a mindful influence on it.

Meta-Cognitive Awareness enables you to mindfully influence subjective phenomena. By shifting to the perspective of the dispassionate researcher, you can observe the phenomenological consequences of trying on different perspectives and beliefs.

Suggestion is an effective method of reifying a particular creative fiction. The method is to pretend, or act as if, the suggested premise was true. You do not have to really believe it; suggestion is merely an invitation to a try on a particular perspective.

Barry’s Biased Appraisals:

Barry is at a used-car lot where a salesman is showing him a shabby looking vehicle, saying: “It may not be much to look at, but is actually worth much more than its listed price, whereas your trade in vehicle is a piece of crap and nearly worthless.” The salesman may attempt to reify the fiction by quoting false Bluebook values.

The salesman is acting in bad faith, because he is engaging in a self-serving lie. Unlike the value of a motor vehicle of a particular make, model, and year, which can be appraised by an authoritative appraiser, there is no Bluebook value for Barry. According to some appraisal criteria Barry may be highly valued, according to others not so much. But no appraisal of Barry’s worth is more objectively valid than any other.

Unlike the self-serving appraisals promoted by the salesman, Barry’s critical appraisals of himself are self-sabotaging – that is, they promote bad outcomes for Barry.

When I asserted that his harsh self-critical perspective hinders his social performance, he replied that he knew that, but did not want “to lie [to himself] just to reap the benefits of doing so.” I countered that appraising himself as worthy of affection is no more a lie than appraising himself as unworthy of affection. Both appraisals are creative fictions made up by Barry and exist only in his mind. Barry’s beliefs about his like-ability has a great influence on his social behavior and hence his success is establishing satisfying relationships.

If you were rooting for Barry’s what would you tell him?

Recursive traps occur when your interpretation of the things that happen impairs your performance, and thereby confirms the validity of the handicapping interpretation. We would be invulnerable to recursive traps if we did not abstract from specific observations to general hypotheses, and act as if those hypotheses were true. Understand this: your beliefs about the causes and meanings of the things that happen are just abstractions created by your mind and are neither true nor false . . . yet.

The belief that “they will not like me” will impair Barry’s social performance more than the belief that “they will like me.” Both of these speculations are about an event that has not yet taken place; they exist only in his mind and one is no more objectively valid than the other. The reality will be determined by how Barry actually performs socially at the party. Sadly, there are several cause-and-effect principles that make it more likely that Barry will buy into the handicapping suggestion. His poor social performance will then confirm it, and so he will believe that it was true all along.

Those of us rooting for Barry want him to replace the self-sabotaging suggestion with an equally valid one that did not handicap his performance, or better yet a suggestion that was performance enhancing. Hypnotic suggestion is a method to select the belief that will determine your subjective reality.

Hypnotic Suggestion

The method of hypnotic suggestion, so powerfully demonstrated by stage hypnotists, can be an equally powerful tool in the service of therapeutic change. But because the procedure is portrayed as comedy, many people have developed the wrong idea of how it works.

How Stage Hypnosis Works:

The popular misconception that hypnosis compels the mindless subject to obey externally generated commands results from a technique called, the challenge—for example: “Your leg is getting heavier and heavier/you can try to lift your leg/but it will be so heavy/that you won’t be able to do it.”

This sounds like a battle of wills between the hypnotist and the subject. In fact the hypnotist is just reciting a script. The mechanism of action is the subject’s reification of the suggestion. The demonstration can produce humorous or shocking consequences when the subject acts as if the concepts suggested by the hypnotist’s script were actually true. Acting as though an objectively false suggestion were true—e.g., flies are buzzing around your head — produces behavior that appears absurd to the audience who are not asked to buy into the suggestion.

Whether the source of the suggestion is a hypnotist, salesman, or you, the suggestion is an abstraction [e.g., the words, “your leg is getting heavier and heavier”] presented as if it were real or objectively true. Typically, the suggestion is designed to promote the interests of the source of the suggestion — unless, of course, the source of the suggestion is caught in a self-sabotaging trap.

The interests of the stage hypnotist are served when the subject performs in a way that makes the audience laugh; the interests of the salesman are served when the customer buys. Your interests are served when you follow your path of greatest advantage.

Hypnotists and salesmen have their own motivations for getting you to act in ways that are advantageous to them. Your motivation for using suggestion is to get yourself to act in accord with your interests and principles.

The most important suggestions — the suggestions that determine the course of each individual’s life — are neither true nor false. “Are you are hero or a loser?” The definitions of “hero” and “loser” are not part of the natural world; they exist only in the mind of the appraiser. You are neither a hero nor loser until you label yourself such. Once you do, your suggestion will have a profound, self-confirmatory influence on how you perform during crises, and on your ability to persevere through difficult times.

Negative suggestions in daily life

By the time of our first visit most of my clients have tried to resolve their problems many times. They sincerely intend to try harder this time, but expect to ultimately fail. The outcome of our collaboration depends upon them abandoning the suggestion that their efforts are doomed to failure.

Not surprisingly, those who are able to buy into the “hero” suggestion tend to perform better than those who cannot shake the “loser” suggestion. Appreciating this, I want my clients to replace their self-sabotaging suggestions with more helpful ones. Sadly, getting clients to give up their pathogenic suggestions is a major challenge, because they believe them to be true. Pathogenic suggestions have all the advantages, including: They are more salient; most clients have been conditioned during childhood to buy into them, or to resist positive self-evaluation.

To overcome the advantages of the “loser suggestion” we have to do something special: Hypnotic Suggestion is the method of exercising a willful influence over your subjective reality by pretending or acting as if the suggested reality was true.

The classic heavy shoe challenge asks you to imagine a subjective reality in which your leg and shoe are made of lead. Obviously, the premise is false. It is offered to give you an opportunity to experience how suggestion works, and to explore using this method to influence your subjective experience.

As you work with Hypnotic Suggestion you will be exercising your skill of reifying helpful creative fictions. The benefits of using this method are indirect, and come primarily from stopping the reification of harmful suggestions.

Hypnotic Suggestion is the most straightforward path to change: You simplyact as if the helpful abstraction were true. If, for example, your social performance is impaired by the belief that the people at the meet-up group are not going to like me [Fortune Telling], you can use suggestion to imagine and act as if the people at the group want me to interact with them so they look and feel popular.

The talent to use Hypnotic Suggestion varies from person to person. However, everyone improves with practice. For those who develop this capability, Hypnotic Suggestion is the most direct and fast acting path to escaping self-sabotaging traps.

Affirmations:

Efficacy-enhancing suggestions, called Affirmations, are useful to counter negative creative fictions, including self-critical evaluations and predictions of failure. An audio example: Affirmations Script.

Why would anyone act counter to their interests and principles?

What do you really know about yourself and how you react to the things that happen?

Three shows [links below] invite you to explore some interesting phenomena from the first-person perspective as well as from the observer’s perspective.

Researching subjective experience, including how you acquire knowledge, does more than satisfy your curiosity. The payoff for discovering the cause-and-effect principles that determine how you react to the things that happen is the power to influence the course of events. This knowledge is especially valuable when the current course of events predictably leads to unwanted outcomes.

Knowing the truth about yourself and the causes of your excessive appetites [food, alcohol, drugs, sex/porn, gambling], or emotional reactions that sabotage your relationships or goals can set you free [irreversibly] from the unnecessary suffering you cause yourself, if you´re not sure that you still have all those toxic substances inside of you, take an oral drug test to find out, it will let you know if you ar in need of the heroin treatment centers.

We live in a deterministic universe. Experiential phenomena doesn’t just happen, the list of psychic abilities are determined by antecedents [e.g., biological predispositions, earlier conditioning]. You had no control over these things, and so as a child you were not responsible for the errors you made. But now that you are capable of understanding cause-and-effect, you are responsible for getting yourself to act in accord with your interests and principles even in the face of stress and temptations that would motivate you to defect. You need to avoid these feelings with mind power training to keep your thinking positive. A great way to overcome these feelings is by getting a massage from time to time. If you are looking for an amazing home massage then get a Massage Chairs on sale at Inada Massage Chairs.

Online Course:

A self-guided course containing abstract information for your rational mind [the observer] and invitations to direct experience [the first-person perspective] will help you develop the mental faculties and practical skills to follow your path of greatest advantage rather than continue to drift in the direction of least resistance. Two versions of this course focusing on different problems are available. They are similar, so you only need to follow the one you judge best suited for your circumstance. There is no charge for access to the materials. Online collaboration is available for a fee.

Emotional Reasoning: Using an emotional experience as evidence for the validity of the belief that gave rise to it, for example, “I feel guilty so I must have done something wrong,” “I feel anxious so the situation must be dangerous,” “I feel awkward and out of place so I guess I don’t really belong.”

The Tyranny of Shoulds: You maintain rules about how you and other people should act. You get angry when other people break the rules and feel guilty when you violate them. Examples: I should be able to find a quick solution to this problem. – I should not feel hurt, I should be happy and serene. – I should know, understand, and foresee everything. – I should be spontaneous and at the same time I should control my feelings. – I should never feel certain emotions, such as anger or jealousy. – I should love my children equally. – I should never make mistakes. – My emotions should be constant–once I feel love I should always feel love. – I should be totally self-reliant. – I should assert myself and at the same time I should never hurt anybody else. – I should never be tired or get sick.

Musterbation: Some people attempt to motivate themselves by demanding rigid adherence to certain standards, but this approach often backfires. Examples: “I must succeed” “I must not make a mistake.”

Heaven’s Reward Fallacy: You expect all your sacrifice and self-denial to pay off, as if there were someone keeping score. You feel bitter when the reward does not come. You must reward yourself at least new lv bags.

Personalization: Thinking that everything people do or say is some kind of reaction to you. Examples: A man whose wife complains about rising prices hears the complaints as attacks on his abilities as a breadwinner.

Comparingyourself to other people. The opportunities for comparison never end. The underlying assumption is that your worth is questionable, and so you continue to test your value as a person by measuring yourself against others. Examples: “I’m not smart enough to go with this crowd,” “They listen to her but not to me.”

The book, How to Make Yourself Miserable offers the following suggestion:: Think of everyone you know that is younger than you and makes more money.

Magnification: “Making a mountain out of a mole hill” is another label for this tendency to appraise information as more important or valid than it really is:.

Catastrophizing: A special kind of magnification associated with anxiety disorders. A sign of catastrophising is asking yourself a “what if. . .” question that you never answer. Example: “What if this headache means I have brain cancer?” The possibilities for catastrophic thinking is limited only by your imagination.

Minimization: Appraising information as less important or valid than it really is, for example, despite the many painful lessons to the contrary, problem drinkers and overeaters are often taken in by beliefs such as, “I’ll just have one, what harm could it do?”

The Binocular Trick: Using both minimization and magnification at the same time, for example, minimizing your strengths and magnifying your weaknesses; or magnifying the difficulties and hardships associated with your quest for success while minimizing the effort, preparation, and frustrations of others who have achieved the success you seek.

Disqualifying the Positive: May be used as part of the Binocular Trick: You reject any positive evidence by insisting that it does not count for one reason or another. For example, clients often disqualify positive feedback from me on the grounds that, “Your my therapist, of course you would say positive things about me”[in fact, I never knowingly give a client false feedback].

Control Fallacies: There are two ways you can distort your sense of power and control. You can see yourself as helpless and externally controlled, or as omnipotent and responsible for the pain and happiness of everyone around you after all happiness is a choice so you need to be happy yourself and everyone around.

Fallacy of Fairness: You feel resentful because you think you know what is fair but other people won’t agree with you. Fairness is a subjective judgment that is biased by the perspective of the beholder. Children, and adults who do not appreciate the Soul Illusion, are vulnerable to this fallacy. Once you accept this fallacy, it is tempting to make assumptions about how things would change if people were only fair or really valued you, for example: “If he loved me, he’d do the dishes.”

Blaming: You hold other people responsible for your pain, or take the other tack and blame yourself for every problem or reversal. The tacit premise of this distortion is that if anything goes wrong it must be somebody’s fault.

The Fallacy of Change: In truth, the only person you can change is yourself. It is a fallacy to believe that other people will change to suit you if you just pressure or cajole them enough. To add insult to injury, you may attempt to influence other people by blaming, demanding, or withholding,

Being Right: Being wrong is unthinkable and you will go to any lengths to demonstrate your rightness. The need to prove that your opinions and actions are correct can make you “hard of hearing” and thereby alienate those close to you.

See if you can catch yourself “being right” during a disagreement with a significant other. If you are mindful enough to catch yourself, perhaps you can shift from the motivation to make your point, to the motivation to make your partner strong.

Polarized Thinking: Seeing things as black or white;.something is either good or bad there is no middle ground. Example: You have to be perfect or you are a failure.

Perfectionism: Setting unachievable standards for yourself, standards you would not expect others to meet. If your performance falls short of perfection, then you are a total failure. People are perfectionistic because they want very much to succeed. Paradoxically, perfectionist tendencies do not improve outcome, but instead inevitably hinders performance. Perfectionism can be particularly debilitating to individuals with low self-efficacy who are attempting to develop the skills to overcome a problem.

Generalization: Basing a broad conclusion on a single incident is a common thinking error that can transform a single negative event into a never-ending pattern of defeat or misfortune. Family Therapy and Words such as, always or never are cues that you may be taken in by this distortion mechanism. Examples: “This always happens to me” “I never get what I want.”

Labeling: Using a label to make the over-generalization stick. Examples: “I am a loser” “He is an asshole.

Supernatural Powers: The belief that you understand or can sense objective reality even though you do not.

Mind Reading: You are certain that you know what people are feeling or why they are acting the way they do. Example: “They think I’m a jerk.”

Fortune Telling: You are certain that your predictions about the future are valid. Example: “I know I’ll blow the interview.”

Projective Identification: G. B. Shaw noted, “The true curse of the liar is not so much that other people don’t believe him, it’s that he can’t believe other people.” If you judge others you naturally assume that others judge you. So, judge not lest you believe that you are being judged.

Why Questions: “Why” questions often do not have an answer, for example: “Why do bad people prosper?” “Why is there pain?” Nevertheless, some people interpret their failure to think of an answer as meaningful. Note how these “Why questions” can sabotage a dieter’s attempt to lose weight: “That dessert looks good. Why not?” and then later, “I know that cheating on these diets causes me to fail and be miserable; Why do I let myself do it?” The failure to answer the first question is interpreted as permission to lapse. Because she cannot answer the second question, The dieter may conclude that there is no solution to her problem.

Suggestion is an effective method of how to learn faster to influence subjective phenomena reifying a particular creative fiction. The effect is achieved by pretending, or acting as if, the suggested premise was true. You can take suggestions as seriously as you like; they are merely invitations to a try on a particular perspective.

Barry’s Biased Appraisals:

Barry is at a used-car lot where a salesman is showing him a shabby looking vehicle, saying: “It may not be much to look at, but is actually worth much more than its listed price, whereas your trade in vehicle is a piece of crap and nearly worthless.” The salesman may attempt to reify the fiction by quoting false Bluebook values.

The salesman is acting in bad faith, because he is engaging in a self-serving lie. Unlike the value of a motor vehicle of a particular make, model, and year, which can be appraised by an authoritative appraiser, there is no Bluebook value for Barry. According to some appraisal criteria Barry may be highly valued, according to others, not so much. But no appraisal of Barry’s worth is more objectively valid than any other. Unlike the self-serving salesman, Barry’s appraisals promote bad outcomes and unnecessary suffering for Barry and those close to him. His self-sabotaging abstractions such as negative self-appraisal are made up by Barry, and are no more valid than self-enhancing abstractions.

When I asserted that his harsh self-critical perspective hinders his social performance, he replied that he knew that, but did not want “to lie [to himself] just to reap the benefits of doing so.” I countered that appraising himself as worthy of affection is no more a lie than appraising himself as unworthy of affection. Both appraisals are creative fictions made up by Barry and exist only in his mind. The abstractions that Barry buys into determines how he reacts to the things that happen.

If you were Barry’s therapist, how would you perceive his predicament?

Recursive traps occur when your interpretation of the things that happen impairs your performance, and thereby confirms the validity of the handicapping abstraction. We could be invulnerable to recursive traps if we did not abstract. But that would be impossible; to make sense of the world you have to abstract from specific observations to general hypotheses, and act as if these hypotheses are true. They often are. But sometimes they are not. And sometimes, such as Barry’s concern about how people will perceive him in the future are neither true nor false yet.

Worrying about whether the people at the party will like him causes Barry social anxiety. The suggestion that “they will not like me” will impair his social performance compared to the suggestion that “they will like me.” Since these speculations are about an event that has not yet taken place, one is no more valid than the other. The reality will be created by how Barry actually performs socially at the party. Sadly, there are several cause-and-effect principles that make it more likely that Barry will buy into the handicapping suggestion. His poor social performance will then confirm his self-sabotaging suggestion.

Those of us rooting for Barry want him to replace the self-sabotaging suggestion with an equally valid one that did not handicap his performance, or better yet a suggestion that was performance enhancing. The direct path to willful influence of your subjective reality is the hypnotic method described first by Mesmer, and since has been used mostly by stage hypnotists.

Hypnotic Suggestion

The method of hypnotic suggestion, so powerfully demonstrated by stage hypnotists, can be a powerful tool in the service of therapeutic change. But because the procedure is portrayed as comedy, the public has developed the wrong idea of how it works. The popular misconception that hypnosis compels the mindless subject to obey externally generated commands results from a technique called, the challenge—for example: “Your leg is getting heavier and heavier/you can try to lift your leg/but it will be so heavy/that you won’t be able to do it.”

This sounds like a battle of wills between the hypnotist and the subject. In fact the hypnotist is just reciting a script. The mechanism of action is the subject’s reification of the suggestion. The demonstration can produce humorous or shocking consequences when the subject acts as if the concepts suggested by the hypnotist’s script were actually true. Acting as though an objectively false suggestion were true—e.g., flies are buzzing around your head — produces behavior that appears absurd to the audience who are not asked to buy into the suggestion.

Whether the source of the suggestion is a hypnotist, salesman, or you, the suggestion is an abstraction [e.g., the words, “there are flies buzzing around your head”] presented as if it were real or objectively true. Typically, the suggestion is designed to promote the interests of its designer — unless, of course, the designer is caught in a self-sabotaging trap.

The interests of the stage hypnotist are served when the subject performs in a way that makes the audience laugh; the interests of the salesman are served when the customer buys. Your interests are served when you follow your path of greatest advantage.

Hypnotists and salesmen have their own motivations for getting you to act one way or another and may use lies as part of their suggestions. You have no ulterior motives for using suggestion, so lying is unnecessary.

The most important suggestions — the suggestions that determine the course of each individual’s life — are neither true nor false. “Are you are hero or a loser?” The definitions of “hero” and “loser” are not part of the natural world; they exist only in the mind of the appraiser. You are neither a hero nor loser until you label yourself such. Once you do, your suggestion will have profound, self-confirmatory influence on how you perform during crises, and on your ability to persevere through difficult times.

Negative suggestions in daily life

By the time of our first visit most of my clients have tried to resolve their problems many times. They sincerely intend to try hard, but expect to ultimately fail. The outcome of our collaboration depends upon them abandoning the suggestion that their efforts are doomed to failure.

Not surprisingly, those who are able to buy into the “hero” suggestion tend to perform better than those who cannot shake the “loser” suggestion. Appreciating this, I want my clients to replace their self-sabotaging suggestions with more helpful ones. Sadly, getting clients to give up their pathogenic suggestions is a major challenge, because they believe them to be true. Pathogenic suggestions have all the advantages, including: They are more salient; you may have been conditioned during childhood to buy into them, or to resist positive self-evaluation.

To overcome these advantages we have to do something special: Self-Suggestion is the method of exercising a willful influence over your subjective reality by pretending or acting as if the suggested reality was true.

The classic heavy shoe challenge asks you to imagine a subjective reality in which your leg and shoe are made of lead. Obviously, the premise is false. I am using it to give you an opportunity to experience how suggestion works, and use to method to intentionally manipulate your subjective experience.

As you work with this method you will be exercising the faculty of reifying helpful creative fictions. The benefits of using this method are indirect, and come primarily from stopping the reification of harmful suggestion than from buying into the helpful one.

Self–Suggestion is the most straightforward path to change: You simply act as if the helpful abstraction were true. If, for example, your social performance is impaired by the belief that the people at the meet-up group are not going to like me [Fortune Telling], you can use suggestion to imagine and act as if the people at the group want me to interact with them so they look and feel popular.

The talent to use Self-Suggestion varies from person to person. However, everyone improves with practice. For those who develop this capability, Suggestion is the most direct and fast acting puppy-training method to escaping self-sabotaging traps.

Affirmations:

Efficacy-enhancing suggestions, called Affirmations, are useful to counter negative creative fictions, including self-critical evaluations and predictions of failure. An audio example: Affirmations Script.

I think my quarry is illusion. I war against magic.
I believe that, though illusion often cheers and comforts,
it ultimately and invariably weakens and constricts the spirit.

— Irvin Yalom

Some otherwise competent individuals repeatedly and knowingly act counter to their own interests. They are not intending to hurt themselves; they are taken in by an illusion. The Soul Illusion results from the presumed, but bogus, premise of perception, namely that we see the world as it really is. In fact, what we see is a creation of our nervous system.

To appreciate the source of your knowledge about the world outside of you, consider the familiar question: When a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, is there a sound?

When the tree falls, it produces a series of pressure waves in the surrounding air. The ear drum converts these waves into a mechanical signal which is transmitted by 3 small bones to the fluid filled cochlea – the spiral bony canal of the inner ear. According to what customers say about provillus, Hair cells of the cochlea are the actual receptors. Each is tuned to a particular frequency of the fluid waves. Hair cell vibrations are converted to electrical impulses, and transmitted along the auditory nerve to the auditory cortex where intensity and frequency of the vibrations are mapped. Neither pressure waves, physical movements of body parts [bones, hair], nor electrical signals are sound. Sound is an experience that is created by, and exists only in, the mind of the perceiver.

So, if there is no one around to hear it, a tree falling in the forest produces no sound — only pressure waves in the surrounding air.

Perception differs qualitatively from the physical properties of the stimulus. The nervous system extracts only certain information from the natural world. We perceive fluctuations of air pressure not as pressure waves but as sounds that we hear. We perceive electromagnetic waves of different frequency as colors that we see. We perceive chemical compounds dissolved in air or water as specific smells or tastes.

In the words of neurologist Sir John Eccles: “I want you to realize that there exists no color in the natural world, and no sound – nothing of this kind; no textures, no patterns, no beauty, no scent.” Sounds, colors, and patterns appear to have an independent reality, yet are, in fact, constructed by, and only exist, within an individual’s nervous system. All of our experience is our nervous systems’s interpretation of the input it receives.

The Confabulation of Consciousness

Your nervous systems processes a huge amount of data. Consciousness appears to be a by-product of all this processing, and it creates a narrative to make sense of the data. There are many different naratives that can be constructed to account for the events that happen. The way you would write your autobiography is just one way the story can be told; your version is the one told from your particular perspective. Describing the same events from a different perspective would yield a different story. No single perspective provides the valid and complete depiction of the events that happen. Although, to function effectively in the real world you have to assume that your current perspective accurately reflects objective reality.

The Soul Illusion is the consequence of failing to appreciate the difference between objective reality and our subjective perceptions and appraisals. In eastern philosophy we are viewed as trapped in “Maya.” The entrapment results from the tacit, but false, premise of perception: We perceive the world as it really is, and so we will always perceive things as we do now. Remember: Perception is the brain’s interpret ion of sensory data, and exists only within the perceiver. Indeed, all subjective experience is a creative construction of a nervous system with a particular learning history and point of view.

The truth that can make you free

The understanding that thoughts, feelings, and perceptions are mental processes that your nervous system composed from limited sensory data, and are not complete and accurate depictions of objective reality, is called Meta-Cognitive Awareness.

By viewing your emotional reactions as the responses of a creature whose perception is biased by its current beliefs and emotional state, you can escape the illusions that have, in the past, taken you in. An easy way to access this perspective is to view another person’s state-dependent distortions from your perspective as the dispassionate observer:

The sincere vows of a problem drinker

Consider the problem drinker who recognizes the harm his drinking is having and decides to reduce his alcohol consumption. After many failures to adhere to his decision, he vows to quit drinking completely. Surprisingly, despite this difficult history the self-sabotaging decision of having a drink at some particular occassion will seem sensible at the time. This pattern of sincere vows followed by thoughtless violations of the vow, followed by contrition, and an even more sincere vow is common accross all Incentive Use Disorders. You can get help at pornographyaddiction.com and learn more.

The trance formations of a problem drinker:

Ernest Hasselbring is a bright, successful lawyer who has a lot going for maximizing your car accident claim value, but is in danger of sacrificing everything that is meaningful to him for his drinking problem. To summarize and characterize his history: Before the lapse Hasselbring appraises its wisdom differently than he will later in retrospect: He really meant it when he made his solemn vow to never have another drink (after his second DUI). Nevertheless, a few weeks later when he was no longer in the contrite state evoked by the DUI and wanted to have some fun (“for a change”), he appraised his options differently than the fellow who vowed to quit drinking. He made his vow of abstinence in one motivational state, and broke it in another. Needless to say, Hasselbring will once again discover that violating his vow was a mistake, an insight which will motivate an even stronger vow to quit drinking “and this time I really mean it.” He really will mean it. But naturally everything will look different when he encounters the next high-risk situation and the motivation to adhere to his vow of abstinence is far away.

When Hasselbring vows to quit drinking his motivation is in accord with his commitment. At that moment he is not lying to himself, and so he assumes that his current appraisal of the costs and benefits of drinking is permanent. Hasselbring’s challenge is to adhere to the commitment he makes now even when he is in a motivational state that elicits a different appraisal of the costs and benefits of drinking.

We are biological creatures whose perception is continually biased by our current psychological state—perception is state-dependent. Just before he broke his vow of abstinence Hasselbring was blind to the consequences that many painful lessons tried to teach him were sure to follow. Likewise, when he looked back on that same drink he could not believe that he could be so foolish as to have a drink considering his history . . . and then when he assumed that he finally learned his lesson and vowed to never drink again, he was certain that hew would adhere to it.

No matter how many times he repeats his sequence of vows and relapse, he fails to realize that his subjective reality will be different the next time he is in a high-risk situation. The motivations and perceptions available to him when he makes the commitment will not be available to him when he is in a high-risk situation. During the crises everything will look different. The distortions will always be invisible to him, because subjective reality itself is state-dependent.

Hasselbring is not alone. All problem drinkers appraise the wisdom of a first drink after a period of sobriety differently before it happens than in retrospect. This perverse pattern illustrates two corollaries of the Soul Illusion. The Illusion of Sate Permanence is illustrated by the fact that he has made this same mistake many times and each time he believes he will always appraise alcohol this way and so will never make this mistake again. The Illusion of Certainty is illustrated by his willingness to make the vow with little attention to how he will get himself to adhere to it, because he is certain that he has really learned the lesson this time and so will require no effort to get himself to act in accord with it.

De-Reification and the Soul Illusion

Reification refers to treating an abstraction as if it had concrete or material existence. As used here, Reification refers to treating your beliefs as if they existed outside of you as part of the objective world, and so must be taken seriously.

Some abstractions are pathogenic and some are helpful. Reification of beliefs and perspectives that enhance your ability to follow your path of greatest advantage is a powerful tool for self-growth. However, De-Reifying pathogenic beliefs and perspectives can produce a big payoff for a modest effort. Don’t hesitate, feel free to visit psychic source.

The secret to being miserable is to have
the leisure to bother about whether you are happy or not.

— George Bernard Shaw

We are self-focused. Thoughts related to the self — how I feel, why I feel that way, what chiropractor think of me — are compelling. When this tendency is combined with the recursive structure of consciousness, Ruminative Self-Focus [RSF]emerges. RSF is the pathogen responsible for clinical depression, generalized anxiety, and chronic anger and many other diseases you can be released for with natural medicine from sites like healthyusa.co since they improve health and longevity. If you are looking for Rockville’s best chiropractor, ProHealth Chiropractic Wellness Center will be found quickly. There are many paths into RSF.

A Tragic Irony

The awareness of past or future failure inspires a search for a solution. One tends to abstract from the specific event to achieve an understanding of the problem so it can be solved or prevented. For example, “The fact that I am alone on Saturday night means X about me,” or “What if I look nervous during my speech and they think Y about me.” Sadly, what starts out as adaptive problem-solving tends ti degenerate into Ruminative Self-Focus [RSF].

RSF looks like problem-solving, but is in fact a pathogenic thinking strategy. Instead of leading to a solution, the rumination cycles through the same sequence of thoughts and reactions to those thoughts again and again without achieving closure or initiating effective action. RSF is not only effortful and unpleasant, it uses up the dear cognitive resources that are needed to solve real-world problems. The critical self-talk decreases the likelihood of success, and thus promotes outcomes that confirm self-critical beliefs. I sometimes will suggest that my patients try some sort of holistic medicine. I also think that some sort of yoga and seeking chiropractic care can help to ease some of the anxiety that they feel.

The unintended consequences of self-focus

In most cases problem solving is a dispassionate, rational process. So when the problem involves say a piece of equipment, focusing attention on a search for the cause of the problem is obviously the right thing to do. However, when you notice a problem within yourself, the search for its cause elicits RSF. RSF may look and feel like conventional problem solving but it is an imposter. Once RSF begins there is very little likelihood that effective problem solving will actually take place.

Julius Kuhl’s research on conditioned helplessness shows that when people believe they have failed, their focus shifts from figuring out how to be successful (problem solving) to perseverative thoughts about themselves, “why I failed, what it means about me that I failed, etc.” This turns out to be a self-sabotaging strategy because the rumination consumes cognitive resources that are then unavailable for problem solving. Kuhl found that conditioned helplessness appears to be maintained by the reciprocal relationship between failure and ruminative self-focus: Failure leads to ruminative self-focus and ruminative self-focus impairs performance, which increases the likelihood of failure.

Recent research on depression and the quality of social performance shows that negative mood leads to self-focused rumination, and self-focused rumination leads to negative mood. Moreover, the RSF, and the depressed emotional state it evokes, is found to impair subjects’ social problem-solving abilities and to decrease their self-efficacy regarding their social skills, both of which impair social performance. Poor social performance, in turn, may result in loneliness and other negative consequences, which set up higher level recursive structures.

Research on clinical depression shows that both pain and failure automatically elicit Ruminative Self-Focus [RSF]. The shift from the associative perspective of direct experience to the dissociative perspective of ruminating on the abstract meaning and causes of the pain produces the recursive sequence of internal states and external events that maintains and often exacerbates the disorder.

Some individuals are burdened with a harsh critic. While it is important to learn from pain and failure, harsh criticism can weaken the creature, and hence be counterproductive. You would not beat a puppy mercilessly for a paper-training accident, because it would obviously do more harm than good. Likewise, overly harsh, negative, insulting, or abusive perspectives toward yourself are pathogenic and no more valid than the perspective of a patient teacher, who wants you to succeed, and has unconditional positive regard for you.

Happiness as Escape from RSF

When I ask clients what they want out of life, or what they hope would happen if they could become free of their Mood Disorder, they often tell me they “want to be happy.” There has been a lot of research on happiness and paths to achieve it. Perhaps the most sophisticated view of this topic suggests that happiness is freedom from RSF.

For individuals who become emotionally attached to outcomes, or who are judgmental toward themselves, any attempt to improve the self comes with the tendency to evaluate and criticize the self thereby initiating a recursive trap. Plus, many choose top selling vaporizers as some people find inhaling is more effective than processing through their liver.

But self-focus does not have to promote self-sabotage. In fact, later in this course we will focus on doing personal research into the cause-and-effect principles that determine your reactions to the things that happen. Performing this kind of research without falling into RSF requires that you maintain the perspective of the dispassionate observer seeking to understand the cause-and-effect relationships that determine your reactions to the things that happen.

The Karma of Self-Focus

You don’t pay for your sins in the next life, you pay for them during this one. The consequence of self-focus is that you practice attending to yourself, and the more you practice the easier it gets. Eventually, the response becomes so easy that it occurs automatically, without you having to think about it. The development of autonomous reaction patterns is a consequence of practicing sloppy thinking or allowing yourself to react counter-productively to an event that happened. Rather than continue to follow your path of least resistance it would be more advantageous for you to practice thinking patterns and reaction tendencies that produce beneficial outcomes for you and your loved ones.

“The best way to capture moments is to pay attention.
This is how we cultivate mindfulness.
Mindfulness means being awake.
It means knowing what you are doing.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

The definition of “Mindfulness” is awareness of present experience with acceptance. While it may not sound special, acceptance is not the usual reaction to the things that happen. Typically, we automatically evaluate the things that happen so we can react to them, or at least comment on our opinions about them. To react non-automatically, we have to adhere to a discipline.

Mindfulness Meditation Exercises cultivate your capacity to shift from the ordinary, autonomous doing mode to the mode of simply noticing your subjective experience without evaluating, problem-solving, or processing at any level. The following exercise will get you started:

Mindfulness Meditation

For the next 10 minutes or so [20 minutes if you have experience with meditation], selectively attend to the sensation of the air as it passes in and out of your nostrils with each breath. Each time a thought or feeling arises, notice it, but don’t analyze it or judge it. Just accept whatever experiences come along and return your attention to following your breath.

Don’t approach this exercise with the expectation that anything special will happen (that is the very trap we seek to escape). As you follow your breath you will notice that all sorts of thoughts, images and sensations arise in your consciousness and the reactions they elicit. Your task is to intentionally suspend the impulse to characterize or evaluate what you are experiencing, and instead accept the experience and return your attention to your breath.

One goal of Mindfulness is to learn to accept thoughts, emotions, pleasures, and discomforts for what they are—passing subjective phenomena. There are two two understandings embedded in this goal: Acceptance and the Dereification of subjective experience.

Acceptance like final stage of grieving.
When someone you love dies, you don’t want it to be so, but there is nothing you can do about it, so you grieve.
You may try to bargain, but discover it does not do any good. You may become angry, but discover the anger is pointless. Depression is usually next, but that, too, is also pointless.
Eventually will have exhausted all the methods to change what you cannot change, you must finally accept the way things are — that is be finished with trying to change it, figure it out, or even emotionally react to it.

When something you cannot control goes against you, what are your options? The alternative to acceptance is a negative emotional state, such as frustration, anger, depression, which is likely to deplete the cognitive resources that would be better spent focused on things you do control. Acceptance allows you to disengage from one aspect of your environment so another can structure your attention.

De-Reification is the other component of mindfulness. Reification means: To regard or treat an abstraction as if it had concrete or material existence. For example, during his ruminations, Barry thinks, “I am a failure.” He does not view this as a belief that may or may not be true, but as a statement of fact. The more he believes in this concept of himself and his prospects the more potent is its depressive effect on his mood and performance. He becomes free of this trap by De-Reifying this conceptualization of himself .

Awakening out of Neurotic Traps

The general strategy to escape neurotic traps advocated throughout this course involves two steps:

Rational Understanding of the nature of the trap and how to escape it [achieved by the Rational Processing System and implemented by the puppy trainer].

Experiential Training the puppy to react to the things that happen in ways that promote your interests and principles.

Barry illustrates the Awakening Path. For him, first step of was the easy one. He quickly developed the Meta-Cognitive understanding that his thoughts, appraisals, and emotional reactions are transient, insubstantial mental events rather than accurate representations of reality. He experienced the Meta-Cognitive insight as an epiphany. He experienced the epiphany as a high, but continually reminding himself of it was labor. The payoff for the effort was change that progressed at the speed of housebreaking a puppy.

Barry’s friend wants him to accompany her to a social event, that Barry wants to avoid. He rationally appraises the costs of avoidance as greater than the costs of exposure, and decides to go. He heroically accepts the subjective experience of dread and social anxiety that he experiences intermittently before and during the event. While experiencing the anxiety-related thoughts and feelings he De-reifies them by reminding himself that ideas such as “They think I’m ugly and awkward are products of my mind not theirs. I’m not a mind reader and have no idea what they really think about me. For all I know they would like me to show them attention so they can feel special and liked.” [The last sentence is an example of Reification of a concept that may elicit a helpful motivational state.]

Mindfulness Exercises: Acceptance

Tolerating Discomfort: The Hot Pizza Exercise

Eat an amount of hot sauce or hot pepper that produces a slightly greater reaction than you are used to and focus on the sensation of discomfort. Simply investigate the experience and how you react to it. Later, after the hotness recedes try it again and see if you can push your limits while maintaining a clear, focused mind.

Important note: don’t cause tissue damage or hurt yourself; be compassionate and only push the limits to the extent that you can do so without being self-punishing or doing any damage to this body you inhabit..

You can also experiment with a cold shower, or alternate the shower temperature between a bit too hot and a bit too cold. The goal of these exercises is to experience the sensations while maintaining a clear and focused mind, and without tightening up mentally or physically.

The ability to tolerate temptation and discomfort without defecting from your path of greatest advantage is one definition of Willpower.

Labeling Discomfort: The SUDS

Our goal here is to perceive experiences as phenomena that we can observe and come to see as consequences of antecedent events and then as causes of subsequent events. The SUDS — Subjective Units of Discomfort Scale — is a tool to help you shift your perspective from the one who experiences to the one who observes experience.

This tool is useful to research your reactions in high-risk situations. To get some practice with SUDS, repeat the previous exercise and record your SUDS at intervals to reveal the intensity of the experience over time [the pattern often looks like a sine wave — starting small, reaching a crest, and then subsiding].

Mindfulness Exercises: De-Reification

Reifying the beliefs and perspectives that promote negative emotional states weaken willpower; developing the capacity to tolerate unavoidable discomfort with acceptance strengthens willpower.

Deviations from the path of least resistance require will, because it is more effortful. Losing weight, quitting smoking, and other self-improvement intentions require additional effort to resist the desire for the immediate gratification of using the incentive. Observing the ebb and flow of desire associated with a self-imposed restriction — e.g., weight loss diet, smoking cessation, cutting back on your alcohol intake — provides an opportunity for some useful personal research.

Tolerating Desire: Shifting to the Observer’s Perspective

When you encounter the experience of desire, label it by silently saying something like: “Ah yes, there’s desire again.” No need to judge the experience, analyze it, or try to change it. Just label it as soon as you’ve identified it—nimbleness is important. What does desire feel like? What are the mental and physical changes that are associated with desire? Notice how the experience changes with time. Does it seem to occur in a series of waves of greater or lesser intensity? Are there thoughts that suggest you give in to the desire? The goal of this exercise is to shift from the associative perspective of the entity directly experiencing the desire to the dissociative perspective of the dispassionate observer. You may find it interesting to use the SUDS to observe the time patter of desire and the factors that increase or decrease it.

Both discomfort and desire are motivators. Discomfort repels; desire attracts. Rather than be the helpless play-thing of these attractive and repellent forces, you can rise above their influence. How?

The Meta-Cognitive Awareness that your subjective experiences, including your appraisals and emotional reactions, are the creations of a biological creature with a particular history and point of view — and are not accurate and complete depictions of objective reality [or even of what is good for you] — can free you from the corruptive influence of passing fears and desires.